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Reality Subsets

The period from 1275 to 1325 saw as great an intellectual revolution as the years 1875 – 1925 (Freud, Marx, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Goedel, Cubism, etc..) – that’s the argument of a book I bought on impulse a while ago, and have only just got round to reading. The Measure of Reality by Alfred W Crosby…

The Canary links to a story in the Daily Express of 19 January. The Canary headline is “This story went viral, yet the German Chancellor’s office confirms The Express fabricated the whole thing”. In effect the Express sub-editors have taken a fairly anodyne report and headed it: “UK and USA are WEAK: Angela Merkel calls…

This month, as Oxford Dictionaries reportedly named ‘post-truth’ as their Word of the Year, an article in the Washington Post, describes LibertyWritersNews, ” a website that gained 300,000 Facebook followers in October alone” whose owners say “they are making so much money that they feel uncomfortable talking about it.” They can earn up to $14…

Lev Manovich lists two types of digitally altered reality: virtual reality and augmented reality. He defines the latter as ” the laying of dynamic and context-specific information over the visual field of a user”. Two lectures yesterday at the Alan Turing Institute on smart cities, by Prof Phil Blythe and Prof Sir Alan Wilson make…

(This posting is culled mostly from two reports in Bloomberg, here and here. To save hyperlinking I have not repeated the citations everywhere.) Bloomberg said: “To outsiders, the Trump campaign often appears to be powered by little more than the candidate’s impulses and Twitter feed.” However, Bloomberg reporting makes clear that there was a serious…

According to The Guardian, Angela Merkel said recently that: ” “I’m of the opinion that algorithms must be made more transparent, so that one can inform oneself as an interested citizen about questions like ‘what influences my behaviour on the internet and that of others?’…Algorithms, when they are not transparent, can lead to a distortion…

In her concession speech, Hillary Clinton indirectly thanked “secret, private” Facebook support groups like Pantsuit Nation. (see for example Endgadget). This was a rather backhanded compliment: she added ‘I want everybody to come out from behind that and make sure your voices are heard’. An article in Vox subsequently explained about Pantsuit Nation: “the group…